520. Manik Gupta
February 6, 1999sm635310@ntu.edu.sg
My bet is that Linux will replace both Unix and NT in the small business segment. This will happen because smaller businesses are only now discovering the advantages of maintaining streamlined operations through the Internet. Linux being FREE makes compelling economic sense. Also, the technical expertise required for maintaining Linux is coming down as more and more people develop the software.
NT is still the king when it comes to providing integrated (Microsoft based) solutions. Obviously, NT will rule in the big corporations as the front end or small-scale applications.
Unix still runs the backend market. However, it is absolutely essential for Unix vendors to develop strategies for growth in this sector. This is because, once the backend is set up, the companies don't really invest more in it. They try to provide more front end applications for their novice users.
So overall, I am putting my money on Linux. However, with the marketing muscle of Microsoft, NT will continue to be the foremost operating system for several users. I hope something will change that :)

519. Arun
February 6, 1999savitar@vsnl.com
Linux must be promoted as the future OS. If only because it is open, cheap and runs beautifully on machines that are considered obsolete. For a country like India, where an computer investment is for most people a life time investment Linux is the only answer.
In business there is not pussyfooting. Of the three one alone can succeed in India and that is Linux. If the other OS's succeed it means that 95% of India will never enter the IT age

516. Samir
February 6, 1999sdesh@hotmail.com
For high volume, mission-critical, 24/7/365 operation use FreBSD. Hop over to www.FreBsd.org and install it over the net. And guess what, its M$ Approved for high volume sites
Check link for yourself.
The NT Path:
Buy a PC and install Microsoft software on it. For a large server, you'll need Windows NT, and the software license will cost about as much as the server. Microsoft has a solutions and best practices Web page
(see Resources below) that states that you can expect to move about 6 gigabytes (GB) a day from three Compaq ProLiant 5000s or 5500s with four Pentium Pro processors and 512 megabytes (MB) of memory each. In order to maintain availability, Microsoft recommends that you install multiple systems with failover.--
This is taken from Microsofts WWW page @http://www.microsoft.com/misc/backstage/solutions.htm
Unix Path:
Buy a PC and install FreeBSD on it. The hardware would appear to cost the same, but you don't pay anything for the software. In fact, as the hardware configuration for wcarchive.cdrom.com shows, this is misleading. wcarchive is only a single system with a single CPU, also a Pentium Pro. In contrast to Microsoft's 6 GB of downloads per day, however, it routinely transfers more than 700 GB of data a day for to up to 3,600 concurrent users. This is over 100 times the performance of three larger Windows NT machines combined. On December 2, 1998, wcarchive transferred 820,097,694,368 bytes of data, making it the busiest FTP server in the world.
Taken fromftp://ftp.cdrom.com/archive-info/wcarchive.txt
Gotta love that Unix.

515. Avinash Gupta
February 6, 1999agupta@mediaone.net
Linux wins hands down on all counts!. Consider this, if I am an ISP, why should I shell out $400 for a server operating system, when I can get better functionality and stability for free!. Plus I get the benefit of Open Source which I know Microsoft can never even dream of providing.
With RedHat Linux, out of the box I get:
- Multitasking, multithreaded, reliable & stable OS
- Apache webserver
- Ftp server
- Telnet server
- Mail and News servers
- Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk, JDK
- C/C++ compilers and debuggers
- X-Windows with the excellent KDE desktop
- Tons of free software

All of the above for a small fee of less than $50, plus freedom from Service Packs and freedom from unknown crashes, plus freedom from constant upgrades (meaning more money), plus freedom of "choice". What more could you ask for?